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Comment by bobxmax | Hacker News Reader

The "pioneer spirit" is so core to the American identity and hard to replicate in Europe

Americans just have a borderline delusional self-belief that other cultures really have a hard time matching

The Gulf Arabs are another group with a similar mentality but they don't have the population, freedom or education (yet) to do the same things

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> The Gulf Arabs are another group with a similar mentality but they don't have the population, freedom or education (yet) to do the same things

Correction, the Gulf Arabs don't. Their autocratic leadership is though. A frequent point of contention between government and public is the private sector - the government wants them all to join the private sector and even provides locals with seed funding for most kinds of businesses. But the locals are rather risk averse and would rather stay in the cushy public sector. The few who are entrepreneurial tend to be extremely entrepreneurial though, and they have a lot of the risk-enabling capital structure in place in Abu Dhabi and Dubai

Yes you're right. The broader population doesn't have that mentality and are, in fact, I would say on average quite lazy. It's a certain group among the elite (especially those foreign educated) who seem to really want to push the needle.

>The "pioneer spirit" is so core to the American identity and hard to replicate in Europe

Consider that the European frontier is either

- west: Americas (already done)

- south: Africa (not gonna happen again)

- north/east: drang nach osten (again, not to be repeated)

- up / down? Perhaps Europe needs to focus on space and mining tech?

Russia has a frontier, and they are pretty strong in engineering, but I doubt that a SV style ecosystem is likely to form, given the… ahem… unique cultural aspects.

All said, I disagree that a frontier experience is necessary: the UK, Germany and Austria-Hungary were massive industrial modernizers while the US was still going through its westward colonization.

Is tech an exceptional field, or just the current SotA in industrial development?

There's different frontiers. Good farmland used to be the big thing. And trade routes, like natural harbors or navigable rivers. So in many parts of the world, most of the best places were already taken and the "frontier" was worse land. But not so in Americas, because there was available land for reasons. You could have "fertile frontier".

Over time when farming technology improved, people could live self-sufficiently in worse places. Transportation technology changed as well. Railways, highways. And now remote working and data centers. So there have been frontiers also in the old world in that sense. The king of Sweden in the 1500s declared some eastern frontier areas as tax free for some time, as he wanted people to settle there to control those areas (in accords, some of it might have been Russia...). Many places have waxed and waned over the centuries. When Estonia gained independence for the second time, some Finnish farmers went there as there was excellent farmland that was very underutilized.

With modern knowledge you could even build up a great place to live almost anywhere. Good policies and cheap energy. Maybe fresh water is the hardest physical requirement.

When it comes to tech startup capital, its not America its Silicon Valley and nobody else. Sure there are deals closing in other regions but the structure isnt the same.

Silicon Beach/Alley/Gulf/Islands within America cannot replicate it either

Without a culture of paying it forward as a reckless angel investor sometimes dressed up as a fund, already within the people that made it, none of these ecosystems get off the ground

Notably, Silicon Valley’s earliest winners were from a government funded initiative

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